TV Studies Term Paper: "Television Star: A Treat or a Torture?"
Television became an integral part of people’s everyday life. Of course, with the advent of the internet, the invention of Lodge John Baird lost its high popularity but still has not totally disappeared. Many people criticize a great bargain of meaningless and irrational TV-shows prevailing in the TV industry, but still spend their time watching them (Stephanie Greco Larson, 2006). Can the “blue screen” change the attitude and consciousness of the society? Can we talk about its only positive or negative impact? Are racial labels the survivals of times past? These questions will be discussed in this paper through the lens of analysing the subjects of minorities in the TV industry.
When it comes to the question of minorities in the USA, we mean several ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics. People mostly treat the term “African American” as “black” and “Native American” as “Indian” as interchangeable. The actual word “minority” for some of them feels like “lesser than”. That is the way the minorities are illuminated in the TV industry and treated in an ordinary life (Stephanie Greco Larson, 2006).
In the early 1990s, the television was a new entry at its early beginning of catching more viewers. In recent years it is a mainstream with lots of ordinary people, instead of professional actors, participating in diverse reality shows, trying to draw American viewers’ attention. On the other hand, reality television is a great opportunity to save the money and solve some financial problems; it is quite cheap but at the same time popular. Instead, it paves the way to new commercial prospects. People are interested in a real life of others and do not even make any slight efforts to guess that it is not real at all. All these circumstances and difficulties we observe in the reality show, be it comedy or drama, are carefully considered and constructed in advance. However, to make it interesting, there should be some problems and resolutions as well as heroes and bullies. It is not of a great surprise that African Americans are in the focus for the role of villains (Tia Tyree, 2011).
Racial discrimination is still in existence with the help of mass media, which frequently serves as a trend-setter, taste-maker and labeller. For African Americans in particular mass media is the cause of appearing new and fresh negative stereotypes, which make a huge impact on viewers’ general opinion. Subsequently, they are treated in a contemptuous and prejudiced manner. Therefore, it is important to discuss the stereotypes in the mass media, representing this ethnic group (Tia Tyree, 2011).
There is no exact definition for the term “reality show”. Some scholars say it is the method to capture real life of people, and there will be no major progress in this sphere for near 20 years. In 1973, the PBS show An American Family appeared as something between fiction and reality, …
